Inside the Star

Charles Pachter Prize and RBC Canadian Painting Competition among abundance of art awards

At the Sobey Art Award’s 10th-anniversary bash at the Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art last week, organizers faced a problem: a stage so small that artists, donors and administrators had to take to it in shifts, shoulder to shoulder.

Anima, a 2012 work by Meryl McMaster, the OCADU grad who won Canada's Charles Pachter Prize last month.

By:Leah SandalsSpecial to the Star, Published on Fri Nov 23 2012

At the Sobey Art Award’s 10th-anniversary bash at the Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art last week, organizers faced a problem: a stage so small that artists, donors and administrators had to take to it in shifts, shoulder to shoulder.

That scene mirrors the way an abundance of art prizes have come to jostle for attention on Canada’s national stage over the past decade.

In the 1990s, we had few national art prizes. Then B.C. artist Takao Tanabe campaigned for the Governor General’s Awards to be extended into the visual arts and the first such awards were distributed in 2000.

Since then, corporations and private foundations have tripled the number of national art prizes, boosting the pot to more than $700,000 in some years (see sidebar.) Several regional awards — like B.C.’s Audain Prize, the Toronto Friends of the Visual Arts Award and the Prix de Montreal — also emerged during that time.

Many Toronto-connected artists have benefited from this recent prize proliferation.

In May, 86-year-old artist Arnaud Maggs (who died Nov. 17) won the $50,000 Scotiabank Photography Award, begun in 2011. In October, Meryl McMaster, a 24-year-old graduate of OCAD University, won our newest national accolade, the $5,000 Charles Pachter Prize for Emerging Canadian Artists.

Next week, the winner of the RBC Canadian Painting Competition will be announced at the Power Plant. Many involved already feel like winners: Queen West dealer Erin Stump says she’s received emails from new contacts nationwide about local finalist Vanessa Maltese, whom she represents.

But others express caution about the increasing popularity of art prizes.

Last year’s Grange Prize winner, Gauri Gill, said she initially found its pitting of one artist against another “disturbing.” Early on, she tried to get nominees to agree to split the $50,000 first prize. (Two nominees, perhaps to their present chagrin, didn’t agree.)

Some artists have declined nominations for the Sobey Art Award. Sarah Fillmore, curator of the 2012 award, says she can understand why: the prize has a span of six months from long list to short list to winner, laden with public scrutiny, and it requires assembling an exhibition on short notice.

“It really is the Survivor of the art world, eh?” Fillmore says. “We ask people to do a lot for a small moment in time.”

Questions have also emerged about the impartiality of prize juries. This month, Montreal artist Lani Maestro received the $25,000 Hnatyshyn Foundation Visual Arts Award from a five-person jury that included her ex-husband and a former colleague.

Dawn Firestone, executive director of the Hnatyshyn Foundation, says a lawyer reviewed the jury’s decision, finding that Maestro won “fair and square.” But Firestone admits, “the community is so small that everyone, at one time or another, has had a relationship. It’s definitely a challenge.”

(Full disclosure: I work at Canadian Art, a partner in the RBC Painting Competition.)

Despite its difficulties, the prize-growth trend is likely here to stay.

Joel Best, author of Everyone’s a Winner: Life in our Congratulatory Culture, and professor of sociology and criminology at the University of Delaware, believes prize growth parallels society’s restructuring into many different “social worlds.” (A “world” can be anything from barbershop quartets to Civil War re-enactors to, yes, painters and photographers.)

“It’s like society is all these little groups. There are too many groups to keep track of and one of the ways we draw attention to our groups is to give prizes,” Best explains.

“If you offer prizes, that’s a signal to people within the social world that this is what the group values. It’s also a signal to people outside the social world that this group has good things happening.”

Finally, Best notes, “prizes are gratifying not just for the people who get them, but for the people who give them.”

In the art-prize realm, for instance, banks get to entertain big-ticket clients at award galas while individuals get to have their names live on for posterity. Galleries see boosts to profile and attendance. And art-worlders get to see their values put forth to a broader public through media coverage.

As for the number of awards a “social world” can handle? It varies.

“A lot of the value of prizes depends on us accepting that they are special,” says Best. “But of course, if there are lots and lots of them, you can start to wonder how special they really are.”

CANADA’S NEW NATIONAL ARTS PRIZES

Charles Pachter Prize for Emerging Canadian Artists

Originated: 2012

Amount: $5,000 each to three winners

Scotiabank Photography Award

Originated: 2011

Amount: $50,000 to winner, $5,000 to two runners-up

RBC Emerging Artist People’s Choice Award

Originated: 2011

Amount: $10,000 to winner

Grange Prize

Originated: 2008

Amount: $50,000 to winner, $5,000 to three runners-up

Hnatyshyn Foundation Visual Arts Awards

Originated: 2006

Amount: $25,000 to winning artist, $15,000 to winning curator

Kingston Prize for Canadian Portraiture

Originated: 2005

Amount: $20,000 to winner, $2,000 to two honourable mentions

Victor Martyn Lynch-Staunton Awards

Originated: 2005

Amount: $15,000 each to seven award areas

RBC Canadian Painting Competition

Originated: 2004 (as national prize)

Amount: $25,000 to winner, $15,000 to two honourable mentions

BMO 1st Art! Invitational Student Art Competition

Originated: 2003

Amount: $10,000 for national winner, $5,000 to 12 regional winners

Sobey Art Award

Originated: 2002

Amount: $50,000 to winner, $5,000 to four runners-up

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